I Connected My AI Agent to 35,000 Actions… The Zapier MCP is INSANE!
it has been a while since I talked about Zapier but Zapier just dropped a really awesome feature that changes everything in how you interact with the platform and how you run potentially in the future your automation and that change is that they introduced MCP which is model context protocol now if you give AI any attention on X or any of the platforms I'm pretty sure you already heard about the concept of MCP or model context protocol and this was a revolutionary protocol that Anthropic dropped and gave everyone last year late last year and this year just picked up like crazy this March and now everyone's building applications with MCPs the easiest way to describe what MCP is it's basically a language so it's a common language that you can teach potentially to your agent and then you can host some content with that language on a server and potentially if you connect your agent to that server speaking the same language without coding anything on your application your agent your AI agent will be able to understand how to use the tools or resources that is there on that server just by communicating with it so it will ask it hey how many tools you have it will answer it i have five tools what are those tools about well I have a tool to use the internet i have a tool to use databases or access databases i have a tool to write into that database read from that database what would you like me to share with you and then the agent will say okay I would like to write into the database the MCP server that on the other end is connected connected to all those tools or services will share with the agent the schema this is how you give me the order please go ahead and then the agent will give that order and get the feedback from the tool or the database so this is pretty much how it works we will have a quick look on the official website for the model context protocol to really understand what goes behind it as a concept but the focus will remain today on what Zapier has dropped so I will show you what they gave us and I'll give you an idea how to use it and we will test it with cursor and I'll tell you why with cursor later on and with this do not forget to hit that subscribe button and hit the like button if you enjoy the video and without any further ado let's get started subscribe to Daddy's channel the mic so here we are so this is the page where they talk about how they're getting into the MCP business as Zapier now if you do not know Zapier Zapier is a no code automation platform a robust one one of the best out there i've been using it for a long time i have solid many automations running on daily and monthly basis on Zapier that I depend on to run this YouTube business every day and do much more with it so this feature coming into Zapier will give my automations a lot of potential in the future today it's limited to cursor in the future I can show you what potential I can have through just Zapier giving us their MCP server customized per user of their own and to each action that you define for yourself through the Zapier platform as we will see in a second okay so this is what they're saying connect your AI to any app with Zapier MCP so this is the language part I told you about this is a connectivity protocol this is something that will change how agents talk to tools and talk to databases so this is the fastest way to let your AI assistant interact with thousands of apps no complex API integration required so basically they're saying here with MCP you get to interact with the thousands of apps that are present on Zapier through your AI agent without any of that complex requirement of building that API request for yourself bit by bit as long as that application is working in your Zap year automations already your accounts are authenticated this is already accessible to your AI assistants wherever you want okay so this is a quick video on how to do the connection of your MCP server on cursor they did it as a case study I would assume only on cursor at this time but what you can you can check out this page i'll put the link in the description and you can just read it for yourself let's jump to the MCP website so you can go to this link i'll share the link in the description this is the modelcontextprotocol.io website and just quickly to go through the introduction just for us to really understand what we are talking about here i already explained it maybe this will be better for some so this is the introduction mcp is an open protocol that standardizes how application provide context to large language models think of MCP like a USBC port for AI application just as USBC provides a standardized way to connect your devices to various peripherals and accessories MCP provides a standardized way to connect AI models to different data sources and tools so that's the way it's just a standardization of how you connect to tools and data sources why MCP well MCP helps you build agents and complex workflows on top of large language models large language models frequently need to integrate with data and tools and MCP provides a growing list of pre-built integrations that your large language model can directly plug into the flexibility to switch between large language model providers and vendors best practices for securing your data within the infrastructure so here you have the general infrastructure of how these application that you might be considering building or you might already have built and you want to migrate to an MCP concept but basically you can see here you have a host with MCP client so basically this is the client where you can access the MCP server we can you can actually use these tools and data sources through the MCP server and then the connectivity happens through the MCP protocol you can see here the MCP protocol and you connect to a server so here the MCP server for example let's say MCP server A is simply Zapier so you connect to Zapier and then through Zapier MCP server you have access to local data sources and local tools just for the sake of the example now this is containerized you can see here these are containerized servers within the same computer this is the example where you have access to the internet so Zapia actually is on the internet it's not within our machine but the the same concept applies and you can have a different server that connects you to different set of tools or databases and then again you can connect through the MCP protocol here and connect to a third server that is probably on your PC as well and then through web APIs actually uh interact with remote service C uh this can have tools like we have with Zapia this can has F tools and data sources as well again all facilitated through that MCP protocol now remember your computer in this case is just for the demo this can be a host that is actually hosted on a virtual machine on a server something that you use like Flowwise or N8N so that's a potential setup that you might have so let's go to Flowwise just quickly this is one flow I have agent flow that I run and it's active for me on Flowwise and you can see these agents here i have around eight agents one supervisor and what they do is all of them have access to a huge number of tools that you can see down here all of these are tools I'm connecting to these workers to get things done for me as agents now this is complex setup each of them you can see I have one two three four i have at least four or five custom tools each of them required me to work with AI to code this tool to get something to to to happen now in theory when I have access to MCP here and I'll tell you why I don't yet in this flow so I tested this today to see if I can get it to work basically I'll have to connect per agent only one custom MCP depending on what I want to access so for example if I want to access Zapier actions or Zapia tools if I have access to Zapier MCP I literally need one tool that one tool will give my agent without any coding access to all of these actions I have on Zapier that we'll test today and implement but fundamentally this will make the flow way easier for many people and in the future today we have Zapier and in the future we'll have more and more services actually offering you their MCP servers to use in such applications like Flowwise so the reason it didn't work on Flowwise is the requirement on Flowwise is to host the actual index file of the MCP server zapier doesn't do it this way zapier offers you a URL to access their actions through the MCP protocol and this is not yet how Flowwise works at some point Flowwise will offer probably the access to their custom MCP node through using a URL when that happens I can use many Zapier actions without building these tools here in Flowwise and just by having this node it's coming and it will make that flow that I showed you 10 times simpler it will be one agent with probably one or maximum two MCP nodes connected to it and that's it okay let's go to the fun stuff let's go to Zapier and play with it and then actually get our AI agent to run actions through the Zapier MCP okay so if we go back to the first page on Zapier and we hit get started here it will take us to this page and this page basically will give you your uh unique MCP server endpoint and this is your instance or your access to the Zapier MCP server with your actions of your applications that are already authenticated on Zapier and here you get your URL and this is a URL to treat with real care because this serves as a key and access to your instance of the Zapier MCP so basically anyone who puts their hand on this can actually run actions on your behalf so this is why they wrote for us here use this URL to connect to the MCP model communication protocol service and what they're saying as well is a big caution over here treat your MCP server URL like a password it can be used to run your AI actions and access your data so you have to be very careful with it and here you can see it is hidden you can just when you use it hit copy URL and if you're not sure if it got exposed you can actually rotate the MCP server basically change the URL itself and then you'll have to reset it as a server we let we go and connect this to our cursor as of now this is the one I found that works with an MCP URL like Zapier did so let's go connect i already did the connection i just want to show you how to do it and then we'll go back do some actions some are already done we'll build more and then we're going to go and test all of that on cursor okay so let's go quickly to cursor and see how we can connect an MCP there okay so now here I'm on cursor let me open a project so you can do it globally as an access to the whole cursor instances that you run or you can do it per project it's easier per project safer per project to customize to your needs those accesses to the MCP server so let's open a demo project just a dummy project just to test this and after that we connect to the Zap year MCP server so let's hit open project okay so I created one called test it has nothing really as a project so on the top right here we click on settings we go to the settings tab and you can see below cursor settings there are site tabs one of them is MCP we click at this one and here in MCP servers we get the MCP servers list and then we can read model context protocol is a way to offer new tools yada yada yada and then they give us a link to basically go and see how it works in cursor we click at it and we go to this link if you scroll down they give us a way how to connect for different types of servers so NodeJS and then Python and then SSE server now if we go back to Zapier you can see it ends with SSE so this is an S SSE server so we go back to the requirement here we copy the code and then head back to a cursor one more time so we click here on this blue button to add a new global MCP server we paste the code as we got it from the cursor documentation and here if you notice we have the environment and AP API keys those are things we don't need in Zapier as we've seen on their website we only need a URL so we can delete that and then we need to give it um a name and put the URL and you can see because I had it before it remembers the URL so we hit accept here and then we get that let's change the name already it's giving me the same thing here we make it Zapier we can hit command and save on this one so now I have the name i have the URL that I got from Zapier again I will change this because now this is exposed so again be careful with your URL now one note before we go back to the settings i tested saving and going back and I wasn't getting the server again i noticed then there was three commented lines you get from copying the code from the cursor site just delete those lines you don't need them those are the ones stopping the server showing in settings so once you do that and you save this file and you close you will have your MCP connection to Zapier in this case showing here and you can refresh it the more every time you add actions so now we are connected this is what we need to care about let's go to Zapier put in some actions and test those and see how it works through cursor so okay going back to this page here I have edit MCP actions if we click at this one if we click at this button it will take us to the action list okay so we get to this page i found some actions already here i think those are actions actually from the days where we used to use Zapier actions into GPTs with OpenAI but I added a couple of them one is send an email to my wife just to test it i didn't want to send an email to everyone and then just create a draft email now those are already there as actions now what we're going to do is add more actions just to show you before we add those actions if we go back for a second to cursor what we're going to see here if I click for the screen to zoom you can see those actions showing here so now we need more actions to be part of this MCP connection so let's go back and build some more okay so what we do is click this add new action and then we'll have to look at one of the actions that's part of the thousands of actions in the Zapier library let's try something with air table so I'll just put air table and options are populating so we have one create record let's have that you can see once I selected the action it autopop populated my credential and other things now I can have everything done by AI so for example I can actually ask AI hey why don't you put a new note for me in this table it will figure out which is the closest name to that table or database and it will add a record you can do that potentially and it will be highly accurate by the way with the models that we have today i do not want to do that i want to be a little bit less random just not to mess with any of my actual records in my Air Tables that I use every day so let's start with the base i'll put a specific base and then we'll see what happens with the table so let me hit a specific base i'm going to go with the YouTube automator this is manages everything I do on YouTube for the table let's keep it random so we'll see how AI will assign this so have AI guess the value of this field and then you can put more information here so we can show all options but one important one is the name so this is the name that the large language model can correlate with the action itself so here I would say create record in table basically okay and we can hit enable action so now we have an action to create a record in air table so this is in the YouTube automator and we have one to create a draft email this is the one that I'm going to use we can build more and more but I think those two are enough to showcase the capability of MCP servers so with this let's go back to cursor and start playing with it so let's go back to cursor here we can close now the settings and we can open our agent and here I can simply ask my agent to do things on Zapier and you can see I didn't do a single line of code with Zapier everything I've done is actually on the MCP server of Zapier so let me first ask to add a record in the uh one of the tables in that base that I selected to put in a comment for example I have one of the tables where I put my personal comments around how I do content on YouTube so this is what I wrote to it add a new comment for me on Air Table on the YouTube comment table that I need to keep my videos shorter and write it in your own way and with some extra advice now before I run this command let's go back quickly to settings and go back to MCP and you can see here before I showed you that the actions show here now we need to give it a quick refresh yep and now you can see that create record in air table is created so this is one more action accessible through this MCP server to cursor now we can safely hit send to our agent and now it will realize what it needs to do with just being connected to Z to the Zapier MCP server and it will prompt us to take the action say run or not run you can see here it's telling us uh we're calling the MCP tool shall I run the tool and say run the tool and now it will go and do the rest for us and we can go to air table and check what kind of comment it put in there so it's done you can see the tick here let's go to our air table and you can see here there's a new one got added just now so if I click at expand it's telling me guidelines for creating engaging short videos it's giving me more details on how to do that and how long to keep my videos 7 minutes is very hard for me to stay within but you can see I just got my agent to add a note for me in the air table just through having access to the Zapier MCP so I will not need this actually let's keep it for a second and do one more action so let's go back to cursor and here let me follow up with the request i'll just ask it to create draft email talking about this the second instruction I gave it is create a draft email for me sharing the same instructions with others create all details uh for the email and I will add the emails later so basically without actually telling it what to do so it has the context of the uh notes or the comments it gave me to do my uh videos in a better way now I wanted to create an email draft email for me using the draft email action um for me to send later for others so we'll hit send and imagine if you use one of those uh voice command type of applications with cursor that are out there so you can actually dictate these things just by talking to it so here again you can see it is calling the MCP tool and it's calling the create a draft email we hit run and it's already done if I go to my outlook and I look at my drafts so this is a test I did before and now this is an new uh test and you can see here hi team I wanted to share some important guidelines for optimizing our video content yada yada yada so it has everything it has a placeholder for the signature and even a placeholder to put the emails it also set the subject for that email which is super interesting so here you have it folks now you understand what an MCP server is how it's beneficial and how to connect cursor with your Zapier MCP server and the potential for that in the future the more we get in terms of accessibilities and features on certain clients like flow-wise i'm going to show more demos around that because this is super interesting and it will make anyone able to create complex flows with complex tools just through accessing this MCP server protocol and linking tools and databases to their agents so if you have enjoyed the video don't forget to hit again the subscribe button like the video share it with others tell me what you think about it in the comment section that what matters the most for me and with this thank you for watching and giving me your time and goodbye subscribe to Daddy's channel give me the mic
2025-04-02 16:59
